In the past few months, I have been watching a very unsettling trend unfold in very competitive ecommerce search results on Google. It appears that huge amounts of money are put into place to systematically and successfully manipulate highly competitive search terms in order to sell fake merchandise of almost every bigger brand out there. Some of these sites even solely exist to steal people's money and don't ship anything at all.
Rest assured that I am not talking about some people doing good linkbuilding or about people buying a lot of links. These operations I talk about are much, much bigger and in all cases almost certainly run by criminal organizations of some sort. They not only greatly affect US search results but are also very present in at least UK, France and Germany.
In this article, I will show you several examples of where Google’s search is absolutely broken (and by broken, I mean that 10 out of 10 page one search results are entirely fraud). I will also show you exactly how these rankings are achieved and take a look at what the impact on consumers may very possibly be. Last but not least, I’ll try to help you recognize these kinds of websites so you can avoid them as they become increasingly difficult to identify.
Exhibit A (“nfl jerseys”)
Let’s get started with [nfl jerseys] as our first keyword to be examined. If you take a look at the US search results on google.com with personal search disabled (add &pws=0 to any search URL), you will get a list of websites which claim to sell said wear and merchandise at a significantly discounted price. Such huge discounts can be found on pretty much any of these fake shops, many ranging up to 75% in “savings”.
Here’s the search engine results page as of 01/04/2011:
(Note: I’m not trying to “out” any particular site, so I removed any domain names in question from the screenshots)
As you can easily see, all of these sites feature ridiculous keyword stuffing in their root page titles as well as the term “jersey” within their domain name. This is both very common among them. Result #5 even contains Chinese letters.
As of this writing, the entire first results page is composed of fraudulent websites. In other words, Google’s organic results have become entirely useless for this search phrase.
Exhibit B (“pandora jewelry”)
Next, [pandora jewelry], also a very popular and well-respected brand. Positions 3, 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are fraud, which results in a 60% share of useless results.
Exhibit C (“thomas sabo”)
Looking at [thomas sabo] SERPs, they feel like a déjà-vu. Another jewelry brand, another wave of artificially boosted shops shipping either replica ware or just nothing at all: results 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 should not be listed there at all in the first place (70%).
All of these sites try to appear as legit and official as possible.
See for yourself
Before diving into the details, I urge you to take a look at Google’s results for these queries yourself. Try searching for other brands, too. Almost every popular brand is affected by this growing issue.
How they do it
Now that I’ve shown you how seriously broken Google is, let’s take a look at why Google is ranking these sites so well. Since these are no legit shops after all, it’s obvious that there is no kind of “branding bonus” or boost through actual social media activity at hand. There’s only one thing that leads to these rankings. You’ve guessed it: keyworded anchor-text heavy links.
The interesting question is though: where do these sites get their (anchor-text rich) links?
I have taken a look at many of these sites and found out that their link profiles are basically comprised of two kinds of links: automated forum and blog spam along with some hacked websites.
Let’s take a look at the anchor text variation of result #1 for “nfl jerseys”:
This site also has a page authority of 64 and a domain authority of 57, according to Open Site Explorer.
Google's best guess for "pandora jewelry" looks similar:
And the #1 "thomas sabo" result:
You might be surprised to see plain-old forum spam work this well, but let me get one thing straight: it’s not like Google is not penalizing or de-indexing any of these sites. I see them come and go on a daily basis (although some actually seem to stick for weeks or even months).
However, these people (or rather organizations) push such huge amounts of these sites into the web that Google - obviously - is having quite a hard time catching up.
In some way, and this is my personal opinion, this might be related to the Caffeine update - Google is now crawling and ranking sites a lot faster than ever before, but it appears overall search quality has suffered dramatically in the past 6 months or so.
Furthermore, link placements on hacked websites are very difficult to spot algorithmically. Granted, many of those links are not visible to the human eye and that should raise some flags since Google is capable of rendering any page, but overall it’s not comparable to catching automated posts on tens of thousands of web forums.
What really should have set Google's alarm off, though, are the link growth patterns. Let's take a look at the "nfl jerseys" top 3:
Two of these sites started spamming back in April 2010 and are still ranking in January 2011. Go figure.
Same goes for "pandora jewelry" and "thomas sabo":
You get the picture.
What Google needs to do about it
Rand talked about it already, and his advice is instantly applicable to this issue: Google needs to greatly lower the value of keyword-rich anchor texts.
Think about it: if Google had not at all taken anchor text into account for these sites, none of them would probably rank anywhere near the top 10 results. Their links come from very different sources, and almost none of those sources is even remotely related to what their pretending to be selling.
As long as anchor text links outrank links from actually related websites, this is not going away anytime soon. Same goes for exact match keyword domains, by the way.
I do realize that anchor text is very important, but its abuse has reached a point where it’s no longer a ranking signal to be trusted as much as it currently is. Heck, I've actually seen websites rank #3 for these terms with one single sentence on the page: "seized by Department of Homeland Security".
What it means for SEO
Google has a serious problem, and I’m sure that they have been working on it relentlessly for quite some time now.
What it means for SEO is that whatever is working for the sites mentioned in this article - it will probably stop working soon. I would not be surprised to see Google shift even more ranking signal power from anchor-text heavy links to relevant social media “chatter”. I have a feeling that it’s gaining more traction as we speak.
Of course, tweets and status updates can be spammed, bought and faked, too. But at least it will buy Google some time.
This fight is never over nor ever "won" by anyone. Ever.
How to identify these sites as a consumer
Since I don’t want any of you to order from these guys and receive either fake goods or nothing at all, here’s some advice to identify them:
Most of these sites:
- offer unrealistic discounts (>=50% are pretty much everywhere)
- have no actual postal address
- supply only a contact form or
- supply only a GMail/Hotmail email address to contact them
- feature way too many “trusted logos” in their footer
- are written in poor English
Considering that most of the sites I talked about earlier already ranked well while all the holiday shopping took place, I can only imagine the damage done to thousands of families and individuals.
Please be cautious and remember that if a deal sounds too good to be true, it very probably is.
Since this is my first article for SEOmoz, please let me know in the comments if you liked this article and give me a “thumbs up” if you did. In case you’ve even been affected by this kind of fraud personally, I’d love to hear from you, too.
- Rouven Balci, SEO at Toms Gutscheine
Great post and great data. I agree there is a problem in many SERPs but I can't agree with your solutions.
1. Exact keyword domains help many businesses rank for their brand. When someone searches for 'business name' and there is a domain called businessname.com, that is generally the best result. This is the same with 'brand name' and brandname.com. Breaking this is not a solution.
2. Anchor text is a great identifyer for the content of a site. Reducing the affect of anchor text in the algorithm is not a solution.
3. Replacing anchor text with social media is not a solution as social media will be gamed in the exact same manner within days. This doesn't buy Google any time.
This is a complicated problem with no easy answer. Some takeaways
1. Real businesses need to do a better job of optimizing their own sites.
2. Google needs to do a better job of determining domain trust. Hacked sites should lose trust so their links lose value. Sites that link out to spammy sites, should lose trust so their links lose value. If your blog has comment spam, you lose trust. Penalize webmasters so they clean up their outgoing link profiles and the world becomes a better place.
But first they have to define spam. Your definition of spam might be different than mine. When I search for 'nfl jersey' the Official NFL Shop is #1 and #2 in the results. This seems to be a good result to me. When I search for 'how to change a tire' I might think the article on carinsurance.com is a perfectly good result even if it was placed there just to get me to their site and I'm not interested in car insurance. If something better should be in the SERPs, write it and promote it.
Totally agreeing with the concept of Trust as a quality signal for SERPs
Good article - I agree that we have a problem. I'm not sure the solution is as simple as penalizing people for optimized anchor text and getting lots of links quickly. Hulu probably went from 0 to 10,000 links in one day. This happens in a legitimate way for sites with a lot of buzz. There are some very legitimate pages with optimized anchor text. This could be a result of "link here" buttons, affiliate programs, badges, or other services where anchor text is legitimately controlled.
As I understand, you're suggesting that Google look at the source of the linking page more than the anchor text of the link. I agree that this should be a larger factor, but for what keyword(s)? Suppose someone on seoMoz writes a post on keyword research, and says something like, "I'm not talking about ___ (mostly unrelated topic with a link)" Should the page then begin to rank for keyword research? Or should Internet marketing pages that link to Internet marketing pages help them rank for ALL Internet marketing keywords?
My point is that building these kinds of solutions into the algorithm is a very difficult process. I know we can all detect spam when we see it, and it's frustrating, but developing big general rules and then turning it into a formula without degrading search relevance or penalizing legitimate sites is a process that takes time.
EDIT: Let's not be so naive as to think that social media is immune to spam. I know of companies with dozens of fake profiles with thousands of followers on Twitter.
Exactly good linkbait can result in 80,000 links in 3 weeks. Should they be penalized for that?
No... but that should anyway alert Google of something happening and therefore to look at closer... and if everything it's ok, as you say in the case of link baiting, then no further actions should have to be done. But what if not? It is in this case, and not as a prior action, that devaluation and maybe banning actions could take place.
Wow... i do not only thumb you up but since now I suggest to consider to move this post to the main blog.
I like your post as you give real data and point to a quite obvious and always preached by us "beware" factor (the instant increase in backlinks). It seems that what we usually preach ("don't do it or Big G will get suspicious") is not so really, or not so much as it would be hoped. And I think that could be quite easy to implement algorithmically and from there activate a presumed spam site investigation (that surely could be done algorithmically too).
What I do not agree is with your somehow despair... but that is because I'm a stubborn optimistic person.
Congratulation Rouven
It would be difficult to create an algorithm that can perfectly identify what is a spam site and what isn't. When you search "work from home", for example, Google's algorithm is going to look for content and site structure that fits what it assumes you want: an easy, fast, "free" way to sit on your @$$ all day and make money (which we know is never going to happen). With the way Google is trying to cover every aspect of the virtual world with their own logo, the chances of this happening effectively and anytime soon is slim to none.
The problem is that Google wants to have their fingers in everything. They have many billions of dollars to just chuck into a fire, so nothing bothers them and they often times get side-tracked from the fundamental problems that matter the most to people like us. For example, they just recently attempted to buy out Groupon for like 6 billion dollars and got declined. What do they do? Throw a hissy fit and decide that they are going to create something of an exact replica to Groupon... seriously? You say you're attempting to "organize the worlds information". I believe Google is getting to the point that it's so rich and powerful that it wants to control all the "relevant" information, but organize everything else in the shit bin.
That is actually a paraphrase of the mission statement....without the shit bin part. They want to be the source for all data...period.
No, their mission statement is to organize all the data. Their mission statement does not declare anything about Google being able to do everything service wise. I take organizing the information as "make everything on the internet easily reachable", not "we are everything on the internet".
Great post and great research, to bring up a point you highlight though, you mention Google using signals from Social networks more will solve problems but I would disagree. Phishing is much easier than hacking websites (generally) and look what happened to MySpace, plus its much cheaper to mass produce twitter accounts (hell you could create networks of accounts following each other) simply a bit of programming (on a consistent platform - easy) and a number of proxies - much easier than building backlinks via forum/blog spamming IMHO.
I also wouldn't be so quick to say Google needs to drop heavy anchor text reliance, Google has some of the greatest minds in tech and I'm sure if it was possible to realistically drop the weighting they are allocating to anchor text that they would have done so a long while ago. Likewise with exact match domains, we give them grief about them but in all honesty it is probably a necessity to curb ranking difficulties that could occur to big brands and charities.
Excellent comment. To add:
1. Social signals are impossible to trust - until Facebook and Twitter can verify that an account is owned by a specific person (and then limit everyone to one account only) - neither platform can really be trusted. Websites are inherently more trustworthy because they have a higher barrier to entry than Twitter, FB, etc.
2. Anchor text shouldn't be discounted wholesale - that would be a mistake. For years Google has encouraged bloggers and webmasters to use descriptive anchor text because it results in a better user experience. If it were devalued overnight, a lot of great sites would suffer.
The post as a whole is quite good, but the remedies are just as perilous as the existing problem. To the author's credit, I don't know that I would have any better of a suggestion.
I'd just point out that both Twitter and Facebook do have teams that verify ownership of celebrity, politician and "VIP" accounts. I suspect search engines could leverage these, much like TrustRank leverages a seed set of trusted sites, to build a social graph that has quality, relevancy and trust signals. I would also add, on a personal note, that I've yet to see a spam Twitter/FB account that stays around for a long time (both services have spam reporting and teams to take actions), gets followed/friended by lots of legit users for a long time, and/or earns references on the rest of the web (most legit Twitter/FB accounts do).
Not sure Google would want to place relevancy and trust into 2 business entities that they have no control over. Both have had site and resource issues. If you're a shareholder of Google do you really want these two companies having that much influence on your ranking algorithm? You have no control over how those two are going to grow over time and what changes they might implement for their own personal gain. Certainly if I was on their Board I'd say how we can we utilize this to our own benefit and keep this traffic for ourselves. Google would be smart to keep them as a factor but not too much influence...if that influence grew too much you've lost control of your #1 asset.
Rand is that maybe also something SEOmoz could add into Mozbar or Linkscape a social trust score for a particular page/website?
Are the views of a few celebrities and VIPs’ inline with the views of search engines users as a whole? It seems an out of step and small sample to base the populations views on.
Was about to post this too, while Twitter does have verified accounts generally celebrities will not usually tweet about competitive niches such as credit cards or car insurance (well unless you "influence" them... https://sponsoredtweets.com/tweeters/celebrity-tweeters/) it would unbalance the link profile toward larger more generic websites that contain link bait content as well as the high value content (more-so than it is now).
Twitter can and is currently gamed, at the moment its on a small scale, simply people spamming their affiliate links - this is easy to catch, but what happens when spammers take the time to build accounts that grow over time (even if its bots following bots following bots) you can create "trust" if you aren't stupid about how you go about it. Also, Twitter have made it difficult for themselves by opening up their tweeting/following with an API, just because one IP address has been used for multiple accounts does not mean that, that IP is spamming - it could simply mean multiple users are using the same online services using their API.
Social signals have been given a LOT of press recently, I strongly believe there is too much hype and not really much weighting given to these factors - but I guess time will tell!
pfff social media "chatter" is already spammed to death, especially on Twitter ... come on!
"I sure am glad that H&H Imports is ranking so high now! Thanks For the Link Drops, Fiddy!"
I believe that we'll see MORE spam if we give celebrity "vetted elites" more power over what's popular. At least now the spammers have to learn how to game the engines. Imagine a world where Justin Beiber can unthinkingly influence your rankings for queries including "music" or "film" (not that "Never Say Never" is evil or anything, I just don't agree that it changes music films forever).
Celebrities aren't very good role models. Trust me, I live in California.
An interesting and timely post, however whilst being in broad agreement I would concur with the view that lowering the value of keyword-rich anchor text would be problematic. If Google were to do so I'm guessing they would need to either -a) devalue external links completely (unlikely, links being the bedrock that Google is built upon), or b) face a new problem whereby spammers simply continue to exploit automated forum and blog spam but using non-keyword-rich anchor text. In other words it would simply shift the problem, whilst at the same devaluing many genuine keyword links that give positive clues about the relevancy of deeper content pages. A great post, tho', and deserving of it's promotion to the main blog (the number of comments attest to that!).
I think the main problem is you can not go and change all of Google because one specific niche you have used examples from is full of spam and black hat and it always has been, I remember researching one specific Thomas Sabo site and it was riddeled with black hat techniques. The reason been the products in the Thomas Sabo/ Pandora/ NJ Jurseys are all high counterfit items which can be mass produced in chinese markets. If you research some of the sites in your articles they are all from chinese areas.
It would be unfair to change the way serps relate becuase of one or two niches, you would never see this in high competition niches like Credit Cards, Life Insurance, loans becuase their is too much competition for spam sites to enter in the first place and if they do they are not around for too long.
Whilst I agree Google should be doing more to fix these problems with SERPS in these "conterfit" areas as their is soo much to be seen these things take time.
But I agree this is a good post, with great information and straight to the point information, Thank you for sharing it with us =)
You have my vote for main blog promotion. Love the addition of "feature way too many “trusted logos” in their footer"
I've been seeing this happening, for the last few months, when doing searches related to one of my clients (a jewelry retailer). In most cases it's just as you showed, they put huge effort into getting spammy contextually targeted anchor text in a very short amount of time, and somehow manage to rank.
We've been investigating this at our company. Our theory is that the sudden surge of backlinks temporarily tricks Google's algorithm into associating the anchor-text surge as breaking news, giving it a temporary ranking boost. But your case seems to be different, the sites we were monitoring only got a boost for a few weeks before plummeting, yours still seem to be going strong.
Just in case you might be wondering, I gave the thumbs down. But I really liked your article. What I see here is mostly a matter of trademark dispute. Remember the internet is not just about america or american-specific culture (or even legislation). I'm no lawyer, but I know that trademarks are registered for each country that the seller is willing to trade in.
So, from an international point of view:
Exhibit A: is NFL a registered trademark in say the top website's host country? Is NFL a registered trademark in all countries? What does NFL mean? I know it means National Football League but it could also mean National Freesbee League...
Exhibit B: Pandora... Same issues... I once read that in Portugal the trademark Microsoft was not the property of that big software maker we all know and love...
Exhibit C: Did you ever hear about the story that there were lot of Hitlers living in New Jersey before WWII and not one since? So who is Thomas Sabo (in Serbia, in India, in China) ? Can another Thomas Sabo be born somewhere else and not register his own name as a trademark and sell jewelry?
These may seem like stupid questions to ask but it's best to explore all possibilities.
Next: Spam tactics. Keyword stuffing? Who does not do it? Even whitehats must use keywords and build links around them, right? SEO does not happen otherwise.
Last: In a world, ok a Google world, where Spam tactics work better than legit ones (What is legit these days? Is SEO a legitimate way to 'steer' Google to put your shop on the 1st page, 1st place?) what will you do? Starve?
Disclaimer: I really liked your post and I have nothing against you or whitehat techniques. But I think that if I must win my bread each day I must stay informed about ALL possibilities, thus sometimes I do play devil's advocate, just to have a balanced view of the situation.
These posts were really useful:
https://www.johnon.com/744/try-or-stay-home.html
https://www.seomoz.org/ugc/spam-tactics-and-how-they-rank
Great article, but as others have pointed out, your solution doesn't make much sense. Devaluing anchor text is throwing out the baby with the bath water, and looking to social media for answers is even more reliable.
I think the solution to this problem is pretty simple: just look for sites that are gaining links at an un-naturally quick rate. If the majority of their links are from forums and blog comments, devalue those links. Simple.
Yeah but if you do that then the new strategy would be to un-naturally link build for the sites above yours. You'd move up by taking others down.
Not really. You would simply devalue those forum and comment links, rather than penalizing the site that's receiving them. That way, the tactic couldn't be used maliciously, and spam sites would no longer be able to use this tactic.
They could probably use a system they also use for image recognition: https://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
For the sites with an unnatural link growth they could push them in a panel where real people could say "valid site" or "spam site". It seems to me as a hard to abuse method.
I'm pretty sure plenty of people in the world are willing to help when the results are getting better by that.
Great investigative reporting. Pretty interesting that comment and forum links are working so well. I like the idea of turning down the knob on anchor text from these sources, although my guess is that the Google will not allocate a lot of resources to this problem unless it gets some mainstream press coverage.
absolutely, in Designer Fashion it is horrendous. look at 'christian leboutin' or 'herve leger'.
Most of these sites are hosted in China / Malaysia. With backlink profiles that are often Mandarin forums. I personally think it's the manufacturers in Guandong trying to move up market and sell directly to the US consumer.
It actually is worrying that google suggest is promoting knockoffs and replicas i.e intellectual piracy.
Great indepth article, thumbs up!
It sure is!
But I think the real solution to this problem is not so difficult for Google to implement at all.Why not implement the following five rules:
1) "Anchor text of external links are not heavily taken into account anymore, only anchor text of internal links still holds value".
2) "TrustRank becomes extremely important for the ranking of any keyword for any given page on a domain"
3) "Drastically lower the value of a domain name's (almost) exact match to a query in case the query is non-branded"
4) "Increase the value of unique ILDs to a domain"
5) "Eliminate the concept of penalties, it only creates more SPAM initiatives"
Off-Page factors such as number of ILDs (regardless of a backlink's anchor text) and TrustRank combined make it alsmost impossible for a spammer to rank for anything at all in Google. If the value of anchor text in external backlinks is greatly reduced, the only reward the spammer receives from link spamming is somewhat link popularity. And link popularity alone doesn't make you rank for any query, which makes it completely useless to build a keyword rich link profile.
Also, in case a domain receives plenty of high-quality (but non-descriptive) inlinks, from well-trusted domains, why not let this domain determine its own anchors? If they are to be trusted, that's something to emphasize from a ranking perspective.
Furthermore, that trusted and well linked-to domain doesn't need a domain name such as "Nike-sneakers.com", "Nike.com" will do just fine and based on the fact they also sell (a lot of different!) sneakers, they should probably rank for sneakers even though their name is Nike.com.
Last but not least, eliminate penalties. If a SPAM tactic is applied, simply don't reward it with high rankings. If you penalize but you still show the tactic works, the whole site is put on a new domain and the problem persists.Cheers...
Crime exists, live with it ...
This post looks like an excuse to leverage seomoz's authority to get couple sites excluded from the index. Am sure Google's spam team are busy filtering such crap out already.
Actually, their policing department is currently barren. That's the reason so many people can get away with it.
But don't worry, give it some time: once Google gets done with a majority of its "revolutionary" and "innovative" projects and they decide to start cracking down on this stuff, all those spam sites are screwed.
You said it!
I really like your strong methodologic approach. I think it would strengthen your case if you didn't remove the domain names though.
When dicussing and fighting spammers, we need to be transparent. And lets be honest: we shouldn't feel bad about calling out organized spammers.
Thanks for putting spotlight on this issue!
Best,
Thomas
The problem is not Google. The problem is a systematic attack by foreign entities who can dedicate tens of thousands of workers to a niche project and still create an ROI.
The name of this post should be "Google Under Attack From Chinese Hackers"
This is not an algorythmic issue. This is a man power issue. Here is what I would do if I were Google:
Impliment site verification proceedures similar to how Google Places now works and also craigslist. If your business does not have proper ownership documentation and verification then too bad so sad you get docked points. That would force the whole web into registering with google officially.
I would have levels of verification. Each level has more trust added. There would be a progress bar in webmaster tools log in that shows verification progress. It could also be reflected in Google Toolbar like McAffee SiteAdvisor. First would be phone verification. Second would be mobile phone text verification. Third would be postcard. Fourth would be a Country specific questionair that rates responses by accuracy and cross references all this with browser history and ip location tracking. All this verification would be done via Places and/or Webmaster tools. Maybe having a verified Google merchant account would be a factor.
All this could be used for official entry into Google directory/Dmoz before it even gets to the human editor's que. Once you jump through these hoops you get listed. Being listed then becomes a major indication of domain trust in addition to all other current metrics.
The web has grown up and site owners are no longer babies. The legit SEO community is large enough to help the non techie businesses jump through these hoops if its too hard. It shouldn't be so easy for a hostile foreign entity to attack non combatant civilian entities like Google, Hung and Facebook.
Sorry about typos and formatting. Seomoz is not nice my Droid X.
That's actually a pretty interesting idea... :g:
That seems like the complete opposite of what Google's mission statement sets out...
It would make google become an organised directory, a members club...if you dont do X,Y,Z you cant be in it...
All the investment Google has made in the past 10 years or however long, has been in the opposite direction to this. Look at Caffeine and the way they can now index new sites, and new content.
Your suggestion, as good as it would be for Directory type sites, just would not work for Search Engines, it is not how they are supposed to work...
Do I have an idea on how to solve this issue, no, but it certainly should not become an exclusive club where only those with mobile phones or postcards can join...
I was unable to edit my previous post from my phone for whatever reason. "Hung" was supposed to be Bing but my phone messed up. I can't wait until dmoz is more mobile friendly! :)Anyway, I would like to say that dmoz is already a source of trust if and when you get listed. These procedures would add trust to that directory and reduce the burden on the volunteer editors. And yes if you don't have a mobile phone you would not get "ALL" the trust juice possible but if you don't have a mobile phone why are you trying to compete for commercial keywords that bring thousands in profit per day to begin with?
But here is the thing. Google could use the SERP's as a community voting machine. If enough people vote certain sector sites as spam it doesn't have any SEO affect but acts like a "to do" list for Google to implement higher trust thresholds like I mentioned above. If users tell Google a certain sector of keywords is full of spam because the commercial intent is so high then they could weed out a lot of the hack/fraud sites in that specific industry/vertical by ranking sites who are "verified" to be real businesses or site owners ahead of the highly untrustworthy sites. They could use their massive advertising reach to get, everyone who is legit, the word that verification will become a trust factor.
Google has been giving all URL's the benefit of the doubt with a policy that says "Spam and get rich and don't worry unless we can catch you." This invites the problem. Why not make sites in highly competitive markets become "verified" as authentic? Everyone in these sectors have SEO teams already. This would not affect poor mom and pop shops or non profit reporters who are not technical enough to go through verification hoops. Google Places already sends them traffic and non commercial terms won't be affected.
It wouldn't be you are "in" or "out." It would be variable levels of "in." The more Google knows who you are the less likely you will be to spam and the less severe actions they would need to take to correct spam from "verified" members. If you logged into your Webmaster Tools profile and it said "ALERT: Your blog articles look like plagiarism spam. Please click here to learn how to fix the problem." Then that link went to a policy page stating that using copy-written material is not a good practice from a business perspective and it is not the best for user experience and therefore it is frowned upon. The number of scenarios like this is limitless. Do you think that person would continue plagiarizing other websites for long?
That's an interesting idea although from a practical viewpoint I would imagine using exisiting trustmarks would prove cheaper for Google.
So what happens when you sell your website? You have to go through the whole process again?
What about affiliates and domainers who may easily own a hundred or more sites?
It seems like a lot of red tape with the potential for a lot to go wrong, but it's an interesting idea. Kind of like licence plates for websites.
- Jenni
This reminds me of something I read today from Scott Adams. It's "the bad version" of a very very very very good idea.
It's only "the bad version" because it's unlikely to happen in this form (see some feedback from other comments), but your idea has real value for Google users, imho. Just needs some tweaking.
I really like the idea, personally, of Google vetting more domains (and pages) through "personal administration" rather than pure formula. To me, something along these lines seems like the next logical step for G to avoid inviting spammers to crap all over rankings via reverse engineering whatever the new algorithmic filter might be.
I'm overwhelmed by your feedback.. thanks! :-)
In case you missed it, Google themselves did a post on search spam a couple of days ago: Google search and search engine spam. Although they do not address linkspam itself, they do acknowledge that Caffeine may indeed have worsened overall search quality.
Anyway, please keep the feedback coming. I appreciate it!
Seems like they are kind of denying the problem exists, but they are working on a solution!!! Interesting that they mention hacked sites. It must be a real problem for them. I have seen hacked sites displaying adwords inserted by the hackers. Go figure.
The forum spam does seem to be getting more pervasive. I just finished deleting 150 machine generated comments from a moderated forum with a PR0. If a forum that offers so little opportunity is getting hit, the spammers must really be attacking the better targets. Not a lot to be gained from spamming that particular forum, but obviously the spam controls need tightened.
This post has generated a pretty active discussion over at Hacker News that is worth a look:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152862
Most interestingly, a user who I believe works on search quality at Google responded to a comment on that thread with something really interesting. Not sure what it means, but in the context of this article, I think it's important...
"Some really dramatic changes to how we use links are on the way. (Sorry I can't say anything more specific. This is a really sensitive area.)"
(It's a long thread, be sure to read it in context.)
That is interesting to note, hope Google will do something about all the black hat spam. Especially the link building spam!
Thanks for sharing the hacker news link.
I own a pretty large forum (nearly 200k members/3 mil posts) and we've noticed a major uptick in bot spam on the forums. While it's been there for years, it's getting much more sophisticated and better written as both new threads and comments to threads. It's not a matter of just auto posting any more, it appears they're (at least in our case, with VBulletin) using the search feature to find posts on topics they can comment in related to their product. Also for starting new threads, they're targeting the more active forum sections which will get more attention from both people and spiders.
It's also no longer just keyword stuffed paragraph with links like it used to be, it's well written posts and I've even seen very general comments in other threads unrelated without a link trying to make them look even more legit. Basic captchas are not stopping them.
I've also noticed this on a couple of other VB forums I hang out on.
In terms of Google detecting this sort of spam, frankly it is not all that hard in most cases. Link graphs that look like Everest, highly focused anchor text, Links on blogs that have hundreds of links out with different anchor texts (often tens in each post top and tailed by links to trusted sites.)
It is frustrating and really not that hard. At the moment Bing seems better to me than Google at filtering this sort of thing (I have a site which is against a spammy competitor, that competitor does not show at all in Bing or Yahoo).
Maybe the big G should have a chat with Microsoft ;-)
Wow This is phenomenal. You have my vote as well to be moved to the main blog. Great work! And Thank you greatly for taking the time to put this together. Google is working on something and many will not be happy when it comes out.
Great Article!! This was very enlightening and I hope to see more from you. I've been wanting to read the SEO moz blog/articles but haven't had the time. I'm very glad that I decided to start with this one!
I have to admit I've been dealing with a direct competitor who's link profile contains 10 local directory links + hundreds forum spammed links. He now outranks a huge company for a very competitive term. I've reported it twice and have seeked help via g webmaster forums and still nothing.... Glad you brought this to light- hopefully we can see a faster move in the right direction!
Moral of the story: He's better at SEO.
Or SES (Search Engine Spamming)
"better" not sure about that. A good SEO focuses on a long term, sustainable strategy.
I do admit however that sometimes short term viability can sometimes be useful and at the moment if that is what you are after the spam route looks viable at present.
I guess it all depends on what you are after.
Some would say a good SEO focuses on the money.
Yeah but worked 4 years ago was considered "good and sustainable" but those methods don't work anymore or as well. As an SEO your duty is to get results for your clients...if Google is rewarding sites for certain type of links don't hate on the site but on Google's algorithm.
I guarantee the links you get today will have less value 2 years from now...nothing is sustainable.
We go with what works and when it stops we move on to other techniques.
I think it depends on what short term is too. There are competitors who have old spammy links from fishing sites, casino sites, poker sites, directories that are 'closed' to new submissions, pay for play sites and so on. The competitors have been ranking high for years. The money they make from the extra traffic keeps them in business. Its a bummer. I guess I need to come up with the awesome infographic that gets the 80,000 links. :)
If I were to hire an SEO and all he did was spam my brand and tarnish my image just to get me good SHORT TERM results in SERPS I would hunt him down. In my mind, a good SEO has to be well aware of any kind of actions done in representation of their clients.
I don't think Google would look at link growth patterns as a way to detect issues because then all you would need to do is spam link build for your competitor and boom they take the hit.
If they devalue anchor text then everyone takes a hit so it will only encourage even more link building to overcome the devaluation process. Anchor text links are one of the best ways to help Google identify how you want that page to be found. You can't rely on on-page content as we've all seen how that can get abused with keyword stuff and nonsense article pages built for one purpose.
I'm not in favor of social media having a greater impact as it will just become a muck of spam as well.
There are no easy solutions.
Hi Rouven,
While I appreciate the article, I have to ask: what exactly was your definition of "spam" in the above graphs? Is it any site selling "counterfeit merchandise" as hinted to in the article opening? Or is it the actual methods used in the site promotion? Could you actually not "buy" merchandise from any of the sites labelled "spam"?
I think that's an explanation that the post would benefit from. The reason I ask is that, obviously, when it comes to brands (such as Pandora) I'm assuming that only a few places can actually legally sell these items. So, once the official outlet is listed, what else would you like to see listed on the page? Should Google only have one result for the term? Or - even if the following results are selling what could be "cheap knockoffs" - isn't that still possibly relevant?
Not knocking the article. I just think there's a larger discussion to be had here.
First I love the term "Organized Spam" it brings to mind a series of films based on an online organization based on spam. I think we will call it; "The Spamfather"
Anyway, being an online retailer I know first hand how dissapointed a customer can be when they have placed an order with another company and did not receive the merchandise. It is also sad to see products that you would like to rank well for being over run by these kinds of malicious (sorry if that is a bit extreme) kinds of sites. So I do hope that Google will begin to start looking at overall quality and user value of the content on these sites, though I realize it is a complex idea to put in place.
I remember the nfl jerseys niche being discussed on SEO Chat forums back in July of last year.
https://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/no-pr-no-backlink-but-top-3t-344779.html?pp=15
well atleast that is one that is now gone....
There's a related issue I've noticed over the last year or so where ad-heavy sites are stealing content from forums and presenting it on their own pages, then linking to the original site as a way to just inject their own ad views into search results. Sites like BigResource and BoardReader do this constantly, and it's made searching for answers to development issues much more difficult.
Excellent, though rather depressing article!
Like it or not, exact match domains & keyword-rich backlinks > *
I'm sorry but the only way forward for commercial SERPs is PPC, with background product info supplied by one or two referance sites like Wikipedia. Looking for an algorithm to handle this kind of spam pressure is fruitless - let the economics of PPC auction decide, with perhaps the best enhancements for PPC quality score coming from ebay-style reviews (not that this cant be faked either!)
I say this as an avid believer in good SEO - but if Google is to show that it's brand of search is valid against competition from Facebook likes (which offers an even bleaker future for commercial search IMO) then it needs to see that it's commercial SERP's are a valuable piece of real estate. If I go shopping in Oxford street in London I dont expect to see 1 million market stalls c/w fake goods crammed into the place who have not paid a penny to be there!
My 2 pennies worth anyway :-)
Matt
I really enjoyed the article, my bottom line take away is that you should always optimize for your user. Focus on quality and not quantity. Whether Google uses the social cues in the rankings or not; having a strategic focused social media presence on Facebook and Twitter can help your brand. While it may be frustrating to see spammy sites shoot up in the rankings they just as quickly fall out of the rankings. Organic web marketing as with most marketing efforts really comes down to knowing your audience, knowing and researching your mediums and finding a voice on those mediums that speaks to your audience.
On another note, I am confused on the third graph exploring "And the #1 "thomas sabo" result". The first website in the SERP was www.thomassabbo.com and it wasn't marked SPAM. So, were you exploring the backlinks of the real site or a SPAM site?
What a great article. Well research, great screen shots and clear explanations. Congratulations to the writer. I havent seen the SPAMing as bad as this so to see your examples was fantastic
I spent some time analyzing one of the spam sites. It's really a case of brute force SEO. The 4000 plus incoming links were mostly from machine generated blogs and websites. I believe it will be quite a challenge for Google do detect what is a genuine link and what is machine generated.
When you have a close look at the copy belonging to the blogs, the language is more or less correct English, but semantically the posts do not make any sense.
In any case thanks for the great post.
Cheers
/Luca
With all that automated post on Twitter I believe that battle is lost well before it even begins. Unfortunately.
Would have been nice seeing a Bing comparison - is this stuff working there as well?
Another point to think about: lately i've seen fake stores appearing on Google shopping results
Great article! Thank you for the information. I will let my clients know!
Great article. I like your thoughts and ideas. Hope this can take part
Excellent and well-researched post!
Just imagine the amount of rubbish this (hopefully short-lived) tactic leaves behind every day. All these spammed forums, hacked websites and meaningless comments. If they go by numbers and have to recreate link profiles for sites they burn this could add up to a terrible amount of rubbish Google would hate to crawl through and waste their resources on. It is in fact suprising that Google hasn't found a quick and effective way to deal with it.
So what is a solution? Don't trust these sites so quickly and apply filters for backlink profiles based on a same technique (e.g. blog comments or forum spam).
Interesting fact: Anti virus software companies reported a huge dip in spam the very same day Oleg Nikolaenko got arrested. Hmmm....
;-)
Dude your first article & you Rocked!!!
I do agree with your in-depth analysis, however I have not came across with any of these spam. Soon will find it & share it with you :)
Waiting for more articles from you.
Great article, a subject that seems to almost ask more questions than it answers! As has been mentioned, I suspect google does take into account things like pages suddenly acquiring hundreds of links very quickly with little or no varied anchor text - it just takes them a while to see it, hence theses kinds of sites staying in the SERPs for weeks or sometimes months, but not much longer.
Like Keywords, it would also seem to a degree that anchor text is now being abused - whether google clamp down on that remains to be seen. Prior to using SEOmoz, I read a lot about Eric Ward and used one or two of his tools for link building (with success I must say), Erics view seemed to be not to request specific anchor text in a bid to appear more "natural" to the search engines.
I suspect as time goes on, more notice is going to be focused on user experience and results, rather than things that can be manipulated by developers/SEOers. For instance outbound linking and the use of no-follows. If you think about it, although wikipedia will rank very well for a lot of terms, it doesn't mean its correct, or the best source of info. It ranks well because a lot will link to it and/or cite it. If you have a link on a wiki page, you will likely get residual traffic from it, but, as far as ranking is concerned it won't do much. If you have a site specifically on say "blue widgets" and you are a blue widget expert, as expert as you might be, your combined learning about your product still came from somewhere so it leads that you would cite other sites to substantiate and enhance your authority. If the SE's go down this road, it will change the SEO playing field substantially.
WOW. I had no idea about this but I always caution my friends and clients about disappering websites with no addresses and strangely worded websites. The SEO bunch are the worst unfortunately and give those of us who really try to do the best for our clients a black eye. Thanks.
A great blog post, we are an online retailer of designer jewellery and stock Thomas Sabo online and Pandora in our highstreet stores.
We have been working hard to promote our designers for the last few years and in particular Thomas Sabo. I must say we find it extremely frustrating, what with the amount of time and effort we put in to SEO, especially with more and more fake sites and non-genuine retailers selling replica products.
We have even posted an article on our blog, as to how to spot a genuine Thomas Sabo online retailer, which you can take a look at here: www.fabulouscollections.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/how-to-spot-a-genuine-thomas-sabo-retailer-online/
If you would like to buy genuine Thomas Sabo charms, please rest assured we are an official retailer and you can take a look at our site here: www.fabulouscollections.co.uk/
Once again, great post.
James
Ecommerce Manager @ Fabulous Collections
I think some of these nfl fraudsters may be exact people who have been spamming my forum tvworlds.com mostly via the blogs
I have the emails they used to sign in my vbulleten system admin (obviously)!
I thought they we're just annoying spammers driving me crackers with their constant (well not constant but regular) spamming activity. Keeping up with the names they sign up under is nigh on impossible
I hate spammers - But I hate fraudsters and rip off merchants even more!
Any advice?
Interesting because i thought most blogging comments and forum links where auto no follow?
I have actually checked my own links and have thousands coming from spammy sites which may give me a penalty. I can't stop this even though i don't want them
I am so glad someone else has noticed this!! The google updates are supposed to stop things like this and instead seem to be promoting it somehow.
I wrote a post about "Low Quality Google Results Since Panda" myself hoping someone would agree with me. This really has some great supporting evidence and arguments.
I think soon the only indicators will be social, unless another search engine catches on. Blekko anyone?
It's interesting to read this post now...more than 2-years later. I think that Google realized they couldn't put up with spam any longer or else they'd start to lose market share. This is visionary stuff!
I think the panda and penguin updates have done what google wanted it to do, but i think a lot of innocent sites have been effected also, maybe their updates are needing a bit of tweaking. However i have seen a lot more spam and scraped content ranking.
I have said many times google are more interested in what sites not to rank rather than what sites to rank.
I'd say there are some groups in china which has more than 1000 SEOers doing SEO, not what you like only links, but all kind of tools for on site, including social media, you can not imagine how twitter and facebook are manipulated by these guys.
The only way, seems no way to stop yet
Quote: "These operations I talk about are much, much bigger and in all cases almost certainly run by criminal organizations of some sort."
Do you have real evidence of organized crime or are you just "imagining" that this is the case based on some keyword stuffing and spammy link profiles? How do you know it is not just affiliates doing the usual affiliate stuff using automated tools?
If you read it somewhere; please use good research practices and post a reference. There's a big difference between keyword stuffing, which countless affiliates use, and non-delivery of goods and you blur the boundary between the two.
This is very interesting post and has really set my mind working. I wanted to ask, how can you really tell that a site is spam without attempting to buy something off of it and not receiving the product? Just because something is offering "too good to be true" offers doesn't nessessarily mean that it is a spam site. Would be interested to hear your thoughts.
It looks as if over the past week or so quite a bit of the spam has been removed. I know a few of the jokers that were spamming search terms relevant to what we provide dissapeared over the past week.
If you want to check SERP full of spam, you can try to search a new movie or album (not still "published") plus the word "torrent" or "download".
All serp is full of faked search serp!
OK, if Google does not catch THIS, how much value is there behind the "sandbox" theory then?
I have never seen anyone being sandboxed, and I wonder how much of the sandbox theory was leaked by those who are aware they themselves cannot possibly keep up with abuse?
Great post btw
It tells me that we often underestimate Google, but just as often overestimate its abilities.
very nice article! I guess there is no easy and good way to deal with the problem as www is so big now and there are just billions of websites and pages.What about giving more power over tweeter talks? I dont think it's the best option, as you mention - it can be easily manipulated... and if the website owner doesn't want to add twitter button (for personal or some sort of reasons) it would some way put him in not the best position and it shouldn't be the case as well...
... but it is easy to negate, as I have not so many ideas for dealing with that problem...
really I reckon some have been on my forum - spill dude spill??
Very nice write up. Over the past 12 months or so, it is fact that Google is manually managing the page one results for the HIGHEST PPC terms. The results you see for auto insurance, health insurance, debt consolidation among others are inspected by humans DAILY. What is being pointed out in these tier 2-3 niches cannot possibly be managed manually by Google. Google has had huge problems with these Xrummer, Scrapebox and other comment and forum automation tools.
I am not sure what the answers are but one thing I can assure you is, that Google does not have their eye on the ball, they are far too worried about Groupon, Chrome OS and Android, they are going to lose their primary cash cow SEARCH.
Note to Google stop trying to take over the world, and keep your search engine providing great results, if you don't someone else will.
Great article with in depth research, thumbs up!This issue is one that should definitely be brought to our attention (as the average consumer). People need to know that just because it is on Google it doesn't necessarily make it legit. I will keep my eye open for these type of sites, and try and warn all my friends. Throwing this article up on twitter for sure!
Out of curiosity, why did you not want to "out" these bad sites?
Great article.
Things to add:
I myself have been studying them already for quite a time.They also use below tactics (aside from keyword stuff/hacked sites/manipulated anchor text/automated spam):
1.Link wheel - they create hundreds even thousands of websites and blogs to link to each other and link back to their main site.
2.Buying bulk links - most of the links they buy are from sites hacked (as the author said)
3.Faked click - they build up tools to simulate human search and click on their sites on Google,as they heard that CTR is a ranking factor.
4.Adwords - yes this is not SEO but they do can hack in!Although their ads may stay up to most 3 days
I have to say they are learning too.Primitive black hat SEO tactics,such as cloaking/hiden text are no longer used (or at least as observed).
Best article I've read so far on YouMoz.
It is worth noting that many, but not all, of the search queries where this is occurring relate to specific brands. Perhaps it is not the link structure that should be examined, but the use of branding in search results as a whole.
It is also worth noting that in most of those search queries, besides your first example, it is generally clear which site is the legitimate holder of such brands on the 1st page of the SERPs, and more so, being in the first position. So in reality, the search engine did in fact do its job correctly.
This is one of those eternal battles that will persist as long as search remains relevant. I build a gun. You build a bullet proof vest. As I continue to hear stories like this about Google's challenges with spam, the argument of Facebook's dominance becomes more realistic.
I was and still am a strong believer that search will never be supplanted, but Google is going to lose some market share if they don't fix this problem and figure out a way to include social queues into their rankings.
Nicely done! In the downloadable games industry, we battle this on a daily basis. It's nice to see someone take the time to call it out so clearly and concisely. Well done.
It's crazy how many gaming sites I see with seemingly endless links from other 'very similar' gaming sites - many of which are on the same IP.
These cats who exploit such algorithm weaknesses are sharp cookies. I wonder if Google will ever find an effective way to keep them at bay. Makes for an exciting industry!
That means a lot. Thanks for sharing. I wonder how do they actually manipulate the search that easy. It's unfair for those who have exerted effort and time just build quality links in order to get to the top. If that's the case then Google is facing a big challenge. Two thumbs up for you. Great!
Just on the general topic of spam I have noticed a new trend in blog spam over the last month. Spammers are taking text from the posts of a the blog they are spamming and then using the stolen text as the text of "their" comment. At first glance, a blog moderator, might be delighted at such a detailed comment and just approve it. Fortunately for me I recognized my own writing style in the comment and did the research to find out where the spammer had lifted his comment.
Nice post.
What we really need to know is whether Google already considers forums as social media. If so then it's the social signal which is getting these sites ranking so well - afterall you would expect the algo to forgive spikes in social media activity because that's the nature of social. I'd go as far to say that the stronger social signals are the better churn and burn sites will perform.
Extending your idea, therefore every site with strong UGC/Community involvement could be considered social. Blogs like this one are by its nature "social"... No, I do not think Google will count blogs and forums in the Social Media Field.
But do you think that Google treats links from easily identified community sites (like blogs and forums) the same as it does from more editorially controlled sites?
I don't have elements to affirm they don't or they do. But it would seems illogical to me they would treat blogs and forums differently from an "institutional" website. It is a question of logic, as to be a blog/forum does not mean not to be an editorial controlled site: all the contrary, it should be even more editorially controlled.
More and more often we read about Google's serps being worse and worse and that they urgently need to address the situation.This week, there was an article in the NYTimes about the poor quality which is due to spammy content site that live on AdSense, today your post and tomorrow another blogger will rant about it as well...
Sure Google knows they are in trouble when it comes to SERPS, surely they have or are working on solutions but... has anyone thought about the benefits for them? If my business model is to sell NFL jerseys, what would I be doing right now? Yep: AdWords!
So don't you find it intriguing that the worst the SERPS are, the more $$ Google rakes in?
As there is no proper alternative to Google at this point, users are 'happy' to keep on Googling, as opposed to Binging or Yahooing. All SE tried to emulate/copy Google's algos so the end results is that there is no alternative for the lambda user...
And why is Google offering all these great solutions like Gmail, Android, etc... to keep us, users, in their 'search sphere', nothing else!
Cynical, moi? :-)
The only positive recently might be the departure of Eric Schmidt, we can only hope that Larry Page will choose a slightly less commercial route and try to address the true end-user experience by improving SERPS and not their short-term profits!
Now to a solution, verification seems to make sense, but they are quite a few sites out there and I cannot see how Google could 'humanely' verify these...
I think you forget that people visit Google because of its SERPs quality history... if the SERPs quality fall deep, people will start to use some other Search Engine, therefore bye bye Adwords revenues (which are just the 18% of the clicks on a SERP).
I agree, if google stops delivering relevant searches and there is a better, more reliable competitor who can change peoples mindshare about what brand people automatically think of for search, it will change things, and quickly.
Great job on this post.
To add to the discussion: Why is it that these obvious anchor-text spamming sites can waltz past the spam detection, yet there are honest sites out there doing link building with targeted anchor text and getting banned/penalized?
It's frustrating as an SEO to continue to recommend building links the honest white-hat way, being careful to not over-optimize, when this stuff is going on.
Also: I hadn't considered the Caffeine update's release correlating with spammy results. Interesting thought there.
Excellent post. Vote for main blog - people, Google even (!) needs to see this.
RE: Link acquistion rates - what happens when there's exceptional posts like news stories, product launches or just a larger volume of shares and mentions in the blogsphere etc? Higher-than-normal link acquisition rates doesn't always equal spam - Google could snap onto that easily if it did me thinks.
Side issue is that Google will let these websites through but seems to have taken a disliking in certain verticals to those comparison websites that actually have official supply agreements or super affiliates. Official partners should not be punished but then leave these scammers in place to profit and ruin people's trust in online commerce.
Thumbs Up - I really liked your post. One query, What is "&pws=0" stands for? How it affects ranking? Also, when I searched without adding it in the end I didn't see any spam results. Most of the sites are pretty much brand & good site. Though your article speaks very good info about Anchor Text Spamming. I agree with others that eradicating anchor text link spamming will not solve the problem there are many ways where you can manipulate the rankings of google.
One thing we can understand that Google give huge weightage to Anchor text linking.
Thanks.
Adding pws=0 disables search result personalization which is an absolute necessity if you're comparing SERPs imo :-)
Do the spam sites show real contact details in their WHOIS?
I've found a lot don't. Perhaps some tie in with verification of site ownership would be a useful tool for them to explore.
Genuine Businesses wouldn't mind having their details shown - in fact it's the law in some countries to display proper contact information and business details.
I know that domains registered with GoDaddy do not show contact details. The solution here is: build reputation servers. Servers that would index every machine, website, nickname/profile in use and rank it WRT different criteria. Allow modifications and edits. Allow people to vote. A job for google in fact.
Not so in Europe... In fact, I suspect that is something under the review of the EU commissions exactly because it can be against the privacy legislation.
I was thinking that non-disclosure might be an issue especially in the UK with the OFT getting involved in links/disclosure and such...
European laws do insist on the user being able to edit "his" data. As always the legislatosaurus is just too slow to catch up with the geeks. If somebody does that their best bet would be to host their servers in countries where data protection laws aren't that sophisticated.
Another solution to explore is just to present SERPS in grids instead of linear lists. That would surely redefine our realities.
That would be an usability mess...
It works when you search for your files on your computer with their explorers or Finders. Plus an expandable thumbnail would allow some design "sexiness", like book covers in digital space.
By this time I'm pretty late to the party but, wow, what a great piece of SEO journalism. There's a pretty clear formula at work it seems. I hope today's algorithm change was a precursor to the kind of solutions you and Rand suggest.
Nice homework on the post!! It really underscores that Google is, increasingly, in the business of spam-prevention just as much as they are in the biz of algorithmic search. With trillions of pages on the web now, and hundreds of millions (or whatever the number) being added on a daily basis, most by web users and not by webmasters, it makes me wonder when Google will reach the tipping point where they would actually serve their users better by NOT indexing the whole web? Transform their model into a combination of an edited directory with fantastic search options, instead of trying to "bring us the universe".
It's a scary problem but people need to discover ranking signals that cant be gamed. Social media signals can be gamed just as easily as anchor text. These marketers have big budgets, if they find out that one factor stops working they will go on to the next. If authority accounts on Twitter get to start determining whats important on the internet this will fail too. These 'authority' people are just like bloggers and plenty of them will be willing and happy to accept payment to endorse sites.
Google economics - Google determines ranking factors, the industries that power those factors get rich from marketers, Google gets rich from marketers for paid search, marketers share their wealth with Google and ranking factor industries, small sites outside this ring mostly get suffocated to death, life goes on. This happens online but also happens offline. There are plenty of marketers with big offline budgets pushing crap products on TV, print, radio. Consumers buy from these companies for a while until their crap outshines their marketing and the companies fall away. This is the same phenomenon that is happening online. The unfortunate thing is that the barrier to entry has been reduced online, Google runs the show, and literally anyone in the world can create a 'company' and potentially get their company in front of unsuspecting consumers.
Brandon
Big thumbs up for this article.
I like the article and the discussion following. Thank you.
I believe Google has the responsibility to comes with soultions of some sort. These sort of activities is hurting the SEO industry and Google knew about these things all along. Once you left the option to cheat the system some people will surely exploit it.
I found it worthless to value inlink and anchor text. more value should be paid towords the reputation of the organization.
Great post and comments. Interesting reading!
What's always puzzled me is the issue of charge backs for dodgy retailer websites. If I bought something from a website and it never showed up or was fake, failing help from the company itself, I would issue a chargeback on my credit card. We'd all do that, right? I guess debit cards are more problematic, but I believe there is still some protection in place.
Is the issue complicated because many of the retailers are in China? I'm curious how they avoid arousing the suspicion of credit card companies, who I thought put restrictions on retailers with too many complaints.
Clearly I’m not cut out to be a criminal mastermind! The fact that the fraudsters persist with these aggressive SEO techniques suggests there is big money to be made, despite the above.
I am an eCommerce developer!!! 50% of the top 10 are using the same software!!! It looks the same to me! Al they are doing is swapping out the images and maybe a little more. ALL these people are from Alibaba. While I have bought from sellers on Alibaba, I have been scammed about 20% of the time. However, the only reason I continued to buy was the legit ones were awesome. Those sellers on Alibaba have their own websites too on their profile page. It loos EXACTLY like the SERPS shown in this post.
Thumbs up for a very interesting, well researched article!
Google has to update and modify its ranking methodology quite fast.
I agree with Kate. Promote the post! Good job. Wonder how many searches you had to do to fine 3 such fine examples though.
Thanks for your vote :-)
I didn't really go through that many SERPs at all. Most well-known brands suffer from this problem so I just had to pick a couple. Some brands are better off, some are worse, but almost every brand SERP is "poisoned" to some extent.
This is realy good.
Does anyone else think that the hackers that are selling access to governement websites, haven't sold the access to blackhat SEOs? I don't doubt that it has happened. I look at this as the next level of illegal SEO practices. I mean why not, you gain access to very powerful sites and drop a few links in the right spots, no one notices and in a few months you have a powerful website, ranking for very competive terms.
I went through Oatmeals super old post on hacking US gov websites about a year ago, and 50% of them still worked. You dont need to be much of a hacker to get hold of link from gov site ;)
Great post! Thumbs up. I agree with Rouven .
Excellent article Rouven,
thanks for this one!
you mentioned that these "fraudulent" sites have the keyword in the domin name like it is a bad hting.
what is wrong with having the keyword in the domain name? alot of legitimate people and businesses do that. for example, SEOMoz.
Well the SEOMoz URL is not seo-tools-marketing-softwares.com is it?
I think that the author is making is that the people are leverage long-tail keywords into their domain buying strategies.
I think the authors point was that if you have a Companies name or brand name in your domain name it helps getting it ranked. This also especially applies to exact match domain names.
For example you could have a domain Buy-Official-NFL-Jerseys.com and as exact match domain search works the way it does (either with or without hyphens if done right) you can rank first in organic search for that sarch term.
This is a classic built for Adsense type of site trick that you see the likes of for sale everywhere. Built for Adsense Amazon ClickBank etc sites still sell.
This form of use by producers of fraudulent site by counterfeiters & gangsters or plain out and out con merchants and thieves is just an extention of how those built for Ad reveune or cookie cutter sites we're built only not so much cookie cutter as more cutting out the cookies and cutting out the cost, quality and the expectations of those who found theirselves victims of the same.
You're trying to be too clever, looking for subtle signals in rate of link growth to detect spam. What's needed is a big hammer. Like ours, at SiteTruth.
I just tried SiteTruth on the three searches on which Google did so badly - "nfl jersey", "pandora jewelry", and "thomas sabo". We do far better than Google on all three.
For "nfl jersey", the top site is the NFL's official on-line store, with a yellow question mark. Down at the bottom are the bogus sites, with a "do not enter" sign. In between are some legit sites, and some marked with grey circles as unrateable or non-commercial. Some of those are down, others are redirector sites with no content.
For "pandora jewelry", the legit sites are at the top, with a yellow question mark, and the junk sites are below, with a red do-not-enter sign.
For "thomas sabo", we have this nailed. The official Thomas Sabo site appears at the top, with a green checkmark, and all the others on the page have a red "do not enter" sign.
How are we doing it? We're not looking at links. We're looking for the business behind the web site. If we can't find it, and the site looks commercial, which includes having ads, it's down-rated. If we can find a business name and address, we check out the business. We look at hard dats sourcces like Better Business Bureau records, SEC filings, Dun and Bradstreet data, and the better grades of SSL certificates.
All this patented: U.S. Patent #7,693,833 So we don''t have to be secretive about how this works. Here are the technical details.
Search spam can be stopped. It requires data sources today's spam-choked search engines don't use, and the willingness to use them.
You guys simply do not get it.Although I do not condone spamming, this sites are just following the algorithim.Identifying blog spam and forum spam is not as simple as it appears, any change in the algorithim to target such spam will not only affect spam sites but the entire web.
How do you differntiate between Joe Smith legitimate web design blogger(whoose backlink profile is allmost entirely blog comments) who ranks well because he provides relevant blog posts on others blogs and the guy in Shenzhen selling fake jersey's whoose backlink appears on the same pages?
What is it that determines if a link is "spam"? anchor text?
If anchor text is devauled the serps for ALL results would be drastically differnt and mostly irrelevant.How would google determine what keywords to rank a website for?Onpage factors are easily manipulated and that would take us back to the 90s.
What would stop my compitotrs from spamming my site?Would that mean my site would be removed from the serps?
Using social-media as a rnaking factor is a joke.Companies sell facebook likes and fans for very cheap.Does that mean Ocho Cinco should be #1 for nfl since you might see #NFL and #OchoCinco in the same tweet very often?
SiteTruth can be manipulated..Anybody with money can get listed in directorys and added to BBB, although it would put a hault to foreign spammers.Even so, your saying a new startup business who went viral overnight doesnt deserve to rank because they are not in certain business directories?If my site gets covered on CNN and has everyone talking about it(and leaving backlinks) it shouldnt be ranked high?
I tested SiteTruth against a few differnt keywords, some of the businesses did not match(for example the adresses match, but names belong to differnt businesses, yet the site was green)
I think google is doing fine just the way it is.Most people with common sense can tell thoose websites are fake, and they typically drop just as fast as they rose up.
Pretty soon it will be almost impossible to spam.
And why is that?
Whenever there's a new algorithmic filter, there will be at least one Olympian to reverse engineer and abuse it Whenever there's a human filter, I imagine the more traditional forms of payola and "good old boy networking" will derail it (at least, for the privileged).
I suspect SPAM will be around as long as search engines exist (even if their name changes).
Fantastic article, well written and really useful... thanks!
Thanks for that in-depth artice. This algorythms would be exciting. For us sem´s every day a new challenge
you hit it right in the head.
google has taken away all the real usefulness from it's own engines
by allowing this type of spam-padding within it's search results.
there should be an entirely different manner of rating merchent sites from
personal sites or blogs. that way people would have a clearer picture of what
brings these unrelated responses up before the actual useful information.
this could be the signal to users that Google Has Lost Its Mindhive.
I cannot believe that these crooks actually got away with this! Hopefully that whatever they are doing, they will get caught red handed. https://www.grandemarketing.blogspot.com
Humour?
not humour blatent disregard for other people's common sense